Last Sunday, I went to see Civil War at a small local movie theater with friends. It was a confusing experience.
Plotwise, it was threadbare. I kept thinking about how this would still provide a good setting for a computer role-playing game (CRPG) (why are there comparatively few CRPGs situated in a present-day-style wartime setting?), and it then struck me that the plot, such as it was, was already a CRPG plot.
We start with a water-riot-based tutorial where we get a refresher on using action points, taking photos, communicating, and even transferring an item to a party member. Then, at the hotel, the main quest starts, and the party is assembled.
An early random encounter demonstrates that one party member needs to be more experienced or have a suitable skill set. The narrative tells us that the main quest's final encounter will be difficult, so the party grinds side quests for levels. They even visit a literal shop and a literal rest site.
During one of the side quests, the party encounters an enemy, a Nazi played well by Jesse Plemons, that's a bit too high for their current levels. Hence, in addition to two temporary party members who were hardcoded to be killed anyway, they lose one of the main party members. After this, they discover that the main quest's time limit has run out, and they're locked out of the best ending. However, the story graciously lets them go through the final battle for another ending.
Alex Garland has also served as a video game writer, so I guess it sticks.
Thematically… already before the movie, I knew that it would try to present a "second American Civil War" without getting too political—a befuddling decision in itself—but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative beyond the basic plotline.
Are the Western Forces, the California-Texas alliance that is pushing on towards Washington DC, justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe. They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!) Still, the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad unless you count that riot police officers are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment. All the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affiliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops.
But since neither side has any weight, it's not really a "war is hell, but both sides are bad" thing, either. It could have been that if there had been more worldbuilding. We barely know anything about the conflict's history beyond some mentions of "Portland Maoists" or an "Antifa massacre."
Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character, a muscular and mustache-sporting journalist partnering up with Kirsten Dunst's main character for a story, as someone doing toxic masculinity? Maybe. Is it bad that the one community (with the shop) has decided to go on conducting life as normal, except with snipers on roofs? Maybe.
They hint that Trump might influence Nick Offerman’s president character, but he's not. His mannerism is not particularly Trumpish; he gives some speeches where he mentions the flag and God and such, but those would be more normie-Republican coded, and he could even be a Democrat. He is a non-entity. I get the idea of trying not to take sides in the current American culture war battles, but it just doesn't work.
The clearest narrative arc is the Kirsten Dunst character on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny's character, the low-level party member who then levels up. Since we've already established that photojournalism is useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, should we care?
Garland probably tried to make a comparison to civil wars in those *other* countries in the Third World as just being confusing and involving barbarous foreigners shooting at each other for no reason. Syria, Lebanon in the 1980s, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, and even something like the civil war in Myanmar now.
But in all those cases, there were apparent underlying ethnoreligious conflicts! (Orthodox) Serbs, (Catholic) Croats, and (Muslim) Bosniaks, the various religion-based groups in Lebanon, Alawites and Sunnis in Syria, ethnic minorities, and Bamars in Myanmar. You can't fully explain these conflicts without reference to those divisions.
Sure, the conflicts weren't as simple as these. You had Shiites or Christians fighting each other at times in Lebanon. If you go to some random village in Myanmar, it might well be ruled by a militia that's not really affiliated with either "major" side in the civil war. And so on. But still, there are a lot of cases in these wars where the battle lines are clear and which side you're on is also evident.
If you try to transpose a conflict like that to the US without transposing the ethnic and religious divisions, the idea you get is that wars really have no meaning at all. It's just people killing each other due to the Bestiality of Man and our native ape bloodlust, and that just makes the Kirsten Dunst character an (even bigger) moron for thinking at any point that this could be changed by taking a photo, making the whole quest even more useless for anything expect thrills, cool images, and a bit of personal development.
The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor but also in large part because these guys at least hold an actual ideology and are doing things that happen in actual civil wars, i.e., running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some state that they find that the whole rest of the movie is a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.
It was a clever idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard. 2.5/5 stars for me, some good cinematography, and 0.5 stars extra for Plemons.
Image: Jesse Plemons’s Nazi character. They probably ended up getting some good EXP out of this encounter!